Publications​Friesen, J., Campbell, T.,* and Kay, A. (2015). “The Psychological Advantage of Unfalsifiability: On the Appeal of Untestable Religious and Political Ideologies." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.(paper available upon request) *equal first authorship Scientific American press

Campbell, Troy, and Aaron Kay (2014). “Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(5), 809-824. (paper available upon request) Wiredpress

People often seek out individuals who are distinguished by their repeated experience with emotive content (e.g. art, comedy). Consumers seek out these individuals for recommendations; corporations hire these individuals to design products for the public; and governments employ these individuals to craft policy for citizens. Lay intuition and past research generally conclude that this abundance of experience improves predictions for others. In six experiments we challenge the generality of this conclusion. We find that repeated or extended exposure to emotive content (jokes, a painful noise, Lady Gaga) leads people to personally desensitize to the emotive content. Further, people incorrectly use their own desensitized emotive reactions to make predictions of others’ emotive reactions—even when normatively they should not, such as when target others have had little or no previous exposure to the content. This leads desensitized others to share and recommend different (and often the wrong) content compared to less desensitized others. However, we find that in general people hold the opposite intuition of the findings and accordingly seek recommendations from desensitized others, thus dooming themselves to experience worse (and potentially quite unenjoyable) emotive content.

People (selectors) sometimes make choices both for themselves and for others (recipients). We propose that selectors worry about offending recipients with their choices when recipients are stigmatized group members and options in a choice set differ along a stigma-relevant dimension. Accordingly, selectors are more likely to make the same choices for themselves and stigmatized group member recipients than non-stigmatized group member recipients. We study this hypothesis in different choice contexts (food, music, games, books) and with recipients from different stigmatized groups (the obese, Black-Americans, the elderly, students at lower-status schools). We use three different approaches to show that this effect is driven by people’s desire to avoid offending stigmatized group members with their choices. Thus, although prior research shows that people often want to avoid being associated with dissociative groups, such as stigmatized groups, we demonstrate that people make the same choices for self and stigmatized other to minimize offense.

Friesen, J., Campbell, T.*, & Kay, A. (in press). “The Psychological Advantage of Unfalsifiability: On the Appeal of Untestable Religious and Political Ideologies." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

We propose that people may gain certain “offensive” and “defensive” advantages for their cherished belief systems (e.g., religious and political views) by including aspects of unfalsifiability in those belief systems, such that some aspects of the beliefs cannot be tested empirically and conclusively refuted. This may seem peculiar, irrational, or at least undesirable to many people because it is assumed that the primary purpose of a belief is to know objective truth. However, past research suggests that accuracy is only one psychological motivation among many, and falsifiability or testability may be less important when the purpose of a belief serves other psychological motives (e.g., to maintain one's worldviews, serve an identity). In Experiments 1 and 2 we demonstrate the "offensive" function of unfalsifiability: that it allows religious adherents to hold their beliefs with more conviction and political partisans to polarize and criticize their opponents more extremely. Next we demonstrate unfalsifiability's "defensive" function: When facts threaten their worldviews, religious participants explicitly state their beliefs are unfalsifiable (Experiment 3) and frame specific reasons for their beliefs in more unfalsifiable terms (Experiment 4). We conclude by discussing how in a world where beliefs and ideas are becoming easily testable by data, unfalsifiability might be an attractive aspect to include in one’s belief systems, and how unfalsifiability may contribute to polarization, intractability, and the marginalization of science in public discourse.

(This paper is part of a larger project that includes a specific project on how people use unfalsifiability to defend their mastery identity which is in progress)

Campbell, Troy, and Aaron Kay (2014). “Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(5), 809-824. (paper available upon request)

There is often a curious distinction between what the scientific community and the general population believe to be true of dire scientific issues, and this skepticism tends to vary markedly across groups. For instance, in the case of climate change, Republicans (conservatives) are especially skeptical of the relevant science, particularly when compared to Democrats (liberals). What causes such radical group differences? Like previous accounts, we suggest this phenomenon is often motivated. However, the source of this motivation, we suggest, is not necessarily an aversion to the problem, per se, but an aversion to the solutions associated with the problem – a difference in underlying process that, we suggest, holds important implications for understanding, predicting, and influencing motivated scientific skepticism. In four studies, all conducted in the context of climate science beliefs, we test this “solution aversion” explanation for why people are often so divided over scientific evidence and why this divide often occurs so saliently across political party lines. Studies 1 and 2 – using correlational and experimental methodologies – demonstrate that Republicans’ increased skepticism towards climate science can be explained by the conflict between specific ideological values and the most popularly discussed climate change solutions. Study 3 demonstrates that Republicans’ increased skepticism towards a different environmental issue and examines at a more micro level the free market ideology as motivator. Last, Study 4 demonstrates in a different domain (crime) that when solutions are framed in a way that uniquely threatens a liberal ideological value, those who hold the liberal ideology will be more skeptical of a problem.

Liu, P. J., Haws, K. L., Lamberton, C., Campbell, T. H., & Fitzsimons, G. J. Vice-Virtue Bundles (in press). Management Science.Download.We introduce a simple solution to help consumers manage choices between healthy and unhealthy food options: vice-virtue bundles. Vice virtue bundles are item aggregates with varying proportions of both vice and virtue, holding overall quantity constant. Four studies compare choice and perceptions of differently composed vice-virtue bundles relative to one another and to pure vice and pure virtue options. Results suggest that people tend to prefer vice-virtue bundles with small (1⁄4) to medium (1⁄2) proportions of vice rather than large (3⁄4) proportions of vice. Moreover, people rate vice-virtue bundles with small vice proportions as healthier but equally tasty as bundles with larger vice proportions. For most individuals, choice patterns are different from those predicted by variety-seeking accounts alone. Instead, these findings provide evidence that bundle choice can be predicted by the identification of a taste-health balance point, determined based on consumers’ perceptions of tastiness and healthiness as a function of the relative proportion of vice in an option.

Campbell, T. and Ariely, D. (working paper) “Giving Misery Company: Complaining and Sharing Personal Negative Information as Acts of Social Altruism.” People often complain about their lives and share negative personal information. In a pilot study we find approximately 70% of daily conversations include some type of personal complaining. This seems odd, given the many costs associated with focusing on one’s own or another’s negative experiences (Schwarz & Strack, 1999; Kowalski, 2002; Martin et al., 1997; Neuman & Strack, 2000). Why then do people share negative personal information? We propose a novel motivation for this behavior: social altruism. We find that people believe they can make others happier by comparison when they tell others about their own personal negative experiences. In this paper we ground our work in the social comparison literature that shows people often construct social comparisons to meet their goals as well as the altruism literature (Batson & Shaw, 1991; Monroe, 1994; Piliavin & Charng, 1990; Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007) that has shown people often help others even at a cost to themselves. Building upon these two lines of literature, we hypothesized and found that people will act socially altruistic and offer the benefit of social comparison by sharing negative personal information, even when they predict such sharing will be costly for themselves. Additionally, we identify personal costs that people willingly trade off to benefit others (personal affect, violating a norm to tell the truth) and identify a number of factors that increase the valuation of the benefit another will receive from sharing personal negative information (the level of the other’s dissatisfaction, the unchangeablity of the other’s situation, and the psychological closeness of the other).